It would be extraordinarily time-consuming, if not impossible, to even attempt to list all of the ways that Christianity is responsible for the creation and development of Western civilization as we know it. Christianity is why the West is literate. It’s why we had the Industrial Revolution. It’s why we have a functioning legal system. All of these achievements, of course, trace to many different individual causes — the contributions of many individual Christian nations, leaders, monasteries, universities, the Crusades, and so on.
But there was one Christian innovation that, all by itself, had a direct, observable, and enduring impact on the trajectory of Western civilization. And while this particular innovation isn’t discussed very much — or at least, it hasn’t been discussed very much in recent history — that’s about to change.
I’m talking about the Catholic Church’s decision, around the sixth century, to ban marriages between first cousins. Once the Church banned first-cousin marriages in the Middle Ages, along with marriages among step-relatives, in-laws, and godparents, the West began rapidly pulling ahead of the rest of the world.
And make no mistake about it, the Church’s influence was indeed the primary reason why Europeans stopped marrying their relatives. The other major religions were expressly endorsing all kinds of incestuous relationships. And the statistics bear this out.
You can see it in this graphic, which is from a paper in Science Magazine, titled “The Church, Intensive Kinship, and Global Psychological Variation.”
Source: “The Church, Intensive Kinship, and Global Psychological Variation,” Jonathan F. Schulz, Duman Bahrami-Rad, Jonathan P. Beauchamp, and Joseph Henrich
For every 500 years that a country was under the influence of the Western Church, which evolved into the Roman Catholic Church, there was a 90% reduction in marriage rates among cousins. The nuclear family began flourishing. Meanwhile, where the Western church wasn’t dominant, incest was rampant. Persians were marrying their own siblings, in addition to their own cousins. Even the Eastern Orthodox Church, which did ban incest, wasn’t as strict as the Western Church.
So what, specifically, were the consequences of banning cousin marriage? Intuitively, you can probably answer that question. If you have any familiarity with, say, Somalia, then you get the basic idea. Inbreeding lowers IQs. It results in strange facial structures. It also results in dramatically increased rates of genetic abnormalities, including terminal illnesses. By common estimates, marrying a first cousin more than doubles your risk of severe disorders. It typically takes away 10 IQ points. One study from 2002 showed that Pakistani children accounted for one-third of birth defects in the UK, even though they only made up 4% of all UK births at the time. A more recent study, from 2013, found that more than a third of children born with birth defects in the UK came from first-cousin marriages, which were primarily Pakistani marriages. By one estimate, more than half of Pakistani marriages involved incestuous relationships of some kind.
You probably learned the relevant biology in high school. Children get two copies of every gene from their parents — one from their mother, one from their father. Generally speaking, if one recessive copy of a gene is corrupted, then that’s not a big deal. It won’t affect the child. But if both parents carry a recessive copy of the bad gene, then there’s a 25% chance that the child will receive both bad copies. First cousins, by definition, share grandparents, which means that they share roughly 12% of their DNA. So if one cousin has the recessive gene for a serious disorder, and marries his first cousin who also has the recessive gene, there’s a one-in-eight chance that their offspring will have the disorder. Therefore, marrying your first cousin drastically increases the risk that your child will have a severe abnormality, as compared to marrying a random member of the general population.
Nevertheless, in many cultures to this day, it’s taboo to acknowledge any of this. Even when parents have a child who’s clearly suffering because of inbreeding, they’re often hesitant to say anything about it.
This is from a documentary that aired in the UK a few years ago. It’s some of the most painful footage you’ll see. Watch:
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong in first-cousin marriages.” She says that, despite the fact that her child is mentally and physically disabled, for life, because she married her cousin.
This is how entire civilizations developed, when they didn’t follow the guidance of the Church. Even though they knew about the dangers of incest — how couldn’t they, it’s obvious — they persisted anyway, because that’s their “culture.” And in the absence of Christianity, this kind of “culture” won out.
And the results have been devastating. Here’s one more example:
Credit: Real Stories/When Cousins Marry/YouTube.com
The Church put an end to this barbarism, at scale. They saved millions of children from suffering a fate like this. And that’s not because they had access to “studies” or “data,” as that report suggests. It’s because they knew that incest was a great moral sin. Also, they had working eyes and ears, and they could see the consequences, beginning with the Romans. As a result, children were protected.
But there were other important consequences of the Church’s ban, as well. Yes, many more Europeans were born without crippling genetic disorders. And that obviously benefited many Western nations, for many generations. But there were other, more subtle benefits as well.
In that paper from Science magazine, the researchers explained some of the benefits, like these:
SCIENCE: 8 Nov 2019. Vol 366, Issue 6466. DOI: 10.1126. The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation.
Countries with … lower rates of cousin marriage are more individualistic and independent, less conforming and obedient, and more inclined toward trust and cooperation with strangers. … Longer exposure to the Western Church is associated with less intensive kinship, greater individualism, less conformity, and more fairness and trust toward strangers.
In other words, when a lot of people are marrying their own cousins, society tends to be much more insular, collectivist, conformist, and ultimately primitive. And that makes sense. When you’re not intermingling with other people — when your marriages only take place within your own family — then family elders generally call the shots. It’s less important to have a functioning government. People become suspicious of anyone outside the family, reducing cooperation and social cohesion.
The result is stagnation — at both the genetic level, and with respect to society at large. Look at countries in South Asia, like Pakistan. They see a highly disproportionate number of genetic disorders as a result of inbreeding. Their governments are also dysfunctional. They’re failed states.
Again, all of this was conventional wisdom for a very long time. No one really talked about the dangers of inbreeding, or the role of the Catholic Church in banning inbreeding, simply because it seemed like common sense. But in some corners of the West, it’s not common sense anymore. Certain countries have now imported so many third-world aliens — mostly from countries that practice inbreeding — that they’re now openly endorsing the practice of marrying your cousin. Yes, in a decade where public health authorities have systematically discredited themselves in seemingly every imaginable way, somehow, the bar has just been lowered even further. In Britain, the government-run National Health Service just published guidance to this effect, promoting cousin-marriage.
This is from The Telegraph.
Guidance published last week by the NHS England’s Genomics Education Programme says first-cousin marriage is linked to ‘stronger extended family support systems and economic advantages’. … The NHS guidance points out that the practice has been legal in the UK since the 1500s as a loophole for King Henry VIII to marry Catherine Howard, his ex-wife’s cousin.
Before we go any further with this article, I need to stop here. The NHS is saying that, because King Henry VIII married his ex-wife’s cousin in the 1500s, therefore we should permit cousin-marriage today. There are two major problems here. First of all, King Henry had no genetic relationship with his ex-wife’s cousin. That’s kind of important. The risk of passing along a genetic disorder due to inbreeding, therefore, was not elevated at all. Secondly, even if King Henry had married a first cousin, it still wouldn’t justify endorsing the idea as a general principle, hundreds of years later. The only possible explanation here is that, for political reasons, the NHS is scrambling to find some way to promote inbreeding, no matter how dishonest it may be. After all, they have to appease all of their new constituents from the third world. So presumably, pretty soon we can expect some official guidance from the British government on how cannibalism and ritual sacrifices aren’t so bad. That’s where this is headed.
But let’s continue with The Telegraph’s report on the NHS’ guidance, because the logical fallacies keep coming.
The document mentions that marriage between cousins has ‘long been the subject of scientific discussion’ based on the slight increase in risk of inheriting diseases. … It also adds that there are other things that increase the risk of this too, such as alcohol, smoking and parental age, ‘none of which are banned in the UK’. … ‘Genetic counselling, awareness-raising initiatives and public health campaigns are all important tools to help families make informed decisions without stigmatising certain communities and cultural traditions,” the guidance reads.
According to The Daily Mail, the NHS guidance also stated that:
In the general population, a child’s chance of being born with a genetic condition is around two to three percent; this increases to four to six percent in children of first cousins. Hence, most children of first cousins are healthy.
They’re implying that doubling the risk of genetic abnormalities is no big deal, because after all, it’s apparently legal to smoke and drink while you’re pregnant in the UK. But that’s not an argument for allowing first-cousin marriages. It’s an argument for also making it illegal to smoke and drink while you’re pregnant. What we’re seeing here, from the NHS, is something that’s become very common in recent years. Organizations that are supposed to focus on public health — and only on public health — are making political and legal arguments instead. The NHS should not be in the business of crafting “gotcha” arguments to justify inbreeding. They should be talking about science and data. That’s it. And when it comes to inbreeding, the science and data are very clear.
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But because incestuous marriages are common in many of the cultures that the UK (and the US) import by the millions every year, the NHS has decided to publish political propaganda instead. They’ve apparently pulled this guidance from their website after massive backlash, but we all know that the British government hasn’t changed its mind, or their goals. As mass migration continues, we will be pulled further backwards into the kinds of primitive practices that our ancestors abandoned millennia ago. That is inevitable.
In fact, in this country, several states — including California, Vermont and Massachusetts — still permit first-cousin marriages. In Connecticut, they’re just getting around to outlawing it now.
This is a news report from a few days ago. Watch:
Credit: WFSB 3/YouTube.com
Notice that everyone they interview in Connecticut — including the random guy who’s forced to clarify he’s not marrying his cousin — has exactly the same opinion on incestuous relationships like this. They all oppose them. And this is an overwhelmingly Left-wing state. As you just heard, for now, this is a rare topic in this country where there is unanimous, bipartisan agreement.
The only way that will change is if, like the UK, we continue to import foreigners until our country is unrecognizable. There’s a very strong argument, as we’ve discussed, that banning incestuous relationships is one of the primary reasons the West evolved, while the rest of the world stagnated. That’s why the enemies of Western civilization want to legitimize first-cousin marriages at the moment. They know it will cement Western decline, just as surely as the bans on incest allowed us to succeed in the first place.
That’s why I’ll say — for the first time in the history of this show — that the federal government should follow Connecticut’s lead. We need a federal ban on first-cousin marriages, universally, before the practice takes hold in the various foreign enclaves in this country. A federal ban would protect children from suffering and dying from terrible genetic conditions. And it would communicate very clearly that, unlike the UK, the United States is still interested in preserving and defending Western civilization. This is not an 80-20 issue. It’s a 99-to-1 issue — and the “1” doesn’t even belong in this country. So whenever the federal government is open and operational again, this is a no-brainer. Admittedly, there aren’t many countries left in the world that would pass a ban like this. But if the United States is going to survive where so many other nations have failed, we need to be one of them.
